Counter-Strike 1 Anthology

YouTube user Blitzkrieg1981 has, after spending around 55 hours pausing and examining episodes of the hit TV show The Office, gone and replicated the entire thing as a map in first-person shooter Counter-Strike.

Fans of the original British series, sorry. This is the American version.

The video above shows Counter-Strike being played on a smartphone (using the game's Matrix mod) and a tablet and it appears to have variable touch controls, although I could be seeing that wrong. My personal preference is that looks a little sludgy to control—notice how many rounds he fires (touching the rifle, to do so, apparently) before bringing someone down with a headshot. However, if you have Sony's Xperia Play, well then you also have a gamepad, and now the experience becomes a little more intuitive.

Still, it's Counter-Strike. The port is being built with the Unity3D platform, will support multiplayer and can be downloaded with either Facebook or Kongregate versions available. There are two versions out there, one for devices running Android 2.0+, another for those running Android 2.3 and up. (See the XDA-Developers thread for links.) That means it won't work on anything with an earlier version of Android.

ZombieK says the images all come from the beta's unreleased office map. "The textures and all the files for the unreleased maps are there except for the maps," he said over e-mail. "I originally ported only the map cs_office from source. And when I opened it in GO the chalkboard spread all over the wall . So obviously it didnt have any coding for how big it should of been but when I saw it, I started digging through every directory."

The first two images are screenshots. The others are art files pulled from the game's directories. The Mesa bits and the crowbar are Half-Life references. The others are jokes about other Valve games, Counter-Strike included. Good teases, Valve fans?

An article on Hungary's MSN portal about teen sexuality uses an interesting image to illustrate its point. And by interesting I mean amazing.

For those who can't instantly see the disaster zone, it's a Holy Trinity of PhotoShop disasters. For starters, either the main is playing on a cardboard box, or the screenshot overlay was so poorly implemented that it looks like he's playing on a microwave door.

Next, that's a Nintendo Entertainment System. Of which Counter-Strike, pictured, missed by over a decade. And finally, it's a Counter-Strike screenshot of two dudes humping.

This mighty helpful YouTube video shows just how far Valve's shooter Counter-Strike has come over the past eight years, between the release of the landmark version 1.6 and subsequent revisions like Condition Zero, Source and the upcoming Global Offensive.

All shots are from the game's trademark level, de_dust2, and show that the biggest addition to GO isn't the lighting or fancy textures. It's the power lines.

As part of a study before people are actually sent to Mars, a team of volunteers spent 520 days locked inside a fake spaceship. To see if they could all stay alive and not, you know, kill each other.

It was mission success, as the six men - three from Russia and one each from China, Italy and France - emerged the other day safe and sound. So how'd they get along and not die of boredom?

Counter-Strike.

According to 32 year-old participant Alexander Smoleyevsky, whenever tensions threatened to boil over between the men, they'd all settle in for a few rounds of Counter-Strike.

Which only shows these were unique men, blessed with the patience required for the epic voyage for Mars. I mean, put me up against a camper and a cheat for 17 months and I won't just get upset, I'll kill them with my bare hands.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive had its first official tournament over the weekend at the New York Comic-Con.

While I showed you a few minutes of play, here's the full one-hour, blow-by-blow brought to you by the guys over at ESL TV. The tourney took place as part of the Intel Extreme Masters Global Challenge New York.